The present pillow-type packaging is to vertically seal up the slices of the packaging materials from the left and right into a complete cavity, while the objects to be packaged are set inside, and then the cavity is cut off and sealed from two ends of the objects, thus resulting in a pillow-like package, which accounts for the name. The whole packaging procedure is highly automatic with a quick pace, applicable for massive, granular, powdery, and liquid objects, as for food like biscuits, yolk pie, chocolate, bread, fast noodles, moon cake, soya-bean milk, milk, soybean sauce, cooking wine, lotus root starch and etc.; and also applicable for the packaging for various commodities, industrial components and medical mechanics. There emerge many specialized techniques and patents on the pillow-type packaging machine.
It is quite a satisfactory form of pillow packaging, during which the slices of materials are sealed up into a cavity meanwhile the object to be packaged are set into the cavity. However, it also comes in with the following disadvantages: 1. A big consumption of packaging materials. The present packaging is completed by stitching up the slices of packaging materials from the left and right, which results in a big consumption of the packaging materials in the stitching part. 2. A bad outlook. The stitches are left outside the completed package. 3. Multi-layer composite material is demanded for packaging materials, leading to a high cost. 4. Compared to tube type packaging, pillow type packaging has one more process, leading to a higher cost and waste of the energy.
Compared with the mentioned packaging techniques based on slices of materials, tube type packaging involves no stitching and no multi-layer composite material, which results in a low cost, a good outlook, better energy efficiency and inexpensiveness.
However, compared to the packaging with slices of materials, packaging with tubular materials has big difference in the procedures during which objects to be packaged are fed.
1. For packaging with slices of materials, it is to place the objects to be packaged into the slices of materials for packaging. No open ends are involved. But for packaging with tubular materials, it can only feed the objects to be packaged into the packaging materials through the open ends, therefore a high accuracy is required with the feeder.
2. For packaging with slices of materials, the feeding can be implemented horizontally or vertically, with no requirement of the height of the feeding position; when objects to be packaged can only enter through the open end vertically opened, it has a high demand of the height of the feeding position, increasing the complexity of the feeder.
3. Packaging with slices of materials allows high speed and multiple feeding with sealing and packaging at the same time, which fulfills the object of a high speed of packaging by only one packaging line. But for packaging with tubular materials, it is to turn a top end of a tube to be a packet for packaging first to enable the feeding and packaging. Respective steps of the procedure can only be conducted in circle instead of operating at the same time, therefore the speed required can only be supplemented by numbers, which is to say, multiple tubes of tubular materials are adopted to complete one step in order at the same time for packaging.
Multiple tubes of tubular materials adopted to complete one step in order at the same time means that multiple objects to be packaged are waiting in queue at respective feeding inlets and the speed of queuing fits the speed of packaging. As the case for instance of 5 objects to be packaged completing the same step of the procedure at the same time, if the target speed is to complete 3 objects per second, it is required that 5 objects to be packaged should be at 5 feeding inlets every 1.6 seconds.
For most kinds of products, they appear concentrated in one line while the feeding inlets are scattered with relatively wide space in between. Therefore, it is a problem to be solved that how to line up the objects to be packaged into multiple lines.
Chinese Patent “A prop-mouth apparatus for packaging bag of automatic packaging machine for dispensable injectors” (Application No.: 200820162608) and Chinese Patent “A material feeding apparatus for packaging bag of automatic packaging machine for dispensable injectors” (Application No.: 2008100634552) offer some solutions related to the topic, but no satisfactory solutions are offered on completing lining up and feeding the objects to be packaged.